Kimberly Peirce's Carrie is one of the more dispiriting films to come out of Hollywood this year. What value the story of the doomed and deprived teenager wielding her mystical newfound power as a woman against those who have demeaned, belittled, chastised and tortured her has is not only in Stephen King's book, nor only in Brian De Palma's 1976 film - it's in the very material upon which this film too depends. Value which the screenwriters have displayed an ignorance towards, and material which they have thus cheapened. Carrie 2013 is a smooth, shiny, toothless horror film that fails to scare, fails to provoke, fails to titillate and fails to engage. If one of the best (though least admitted to) reasons to remake a movie is to iron out its imperfections (De Palma's Carrie has few of those), it's a horrendous shame to watch a remake fall so far short of all that the original achieved, missing easy, identifiable targets already reached in the original. Peirce may not be to blame for the homogenisation of all the irreverent, barbed tones of voice struck by De Palma into such a flavourless soup of useless teen movie staples, but whatever character she does attempt to lend this film is much too insipid to make its presence felt. Carol Spier's sets and Marco Beltrami's score ought to have been high points, but they're uncharacteristically forgettable. Quality of acting varies enormously, with several of the actors playing Carrie's schoolmates giving heinous performances. Julianne Moore has gone deeper before, but she wisely doesn't seem to want to try to match Piper Laurie's work in the role of Margaret White. Chloe Moretz shows a shallow and misguided understanding of her character, and is blatantly badly-suited to her role.
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